Friday, 4 September 2015

The Israelite in whom there was no guile and the boys he saved from the Nazis; Paul Philip Levertoff (1878-1954), Barkingside Cemetery

Schneur Zalman

The
intriguing epitaph on this modest grave reads “In loving memory of the Reverend
Dr. Paul Phillip Levertoff, Scholar and Saint, who departed this life July 31
1954, aged 75 years. An Israelite in whom there is no guile. Erected by his
wife and the boys he saved from the Nazis.” Paul Levertoff was the Vicar of
Holy Trinity in Shoreditch who lived at 5 Mansfield Road in Ilford, was married
with two daughters, the youngest of which was the poet Denise Levertov and who
came from what seems an almost impossibly exotic background for an Anglican
clergyman. Paul Phillip had been born Feivel Levertoff, a Russian Jew, in the
town of Orsha, Belarus in 1878 to a distinguished family of Hassidim. One of
his ancestors was the miracle working Rabbi Schneur Zalman, the Rav of White
Russia, who as a child was so precociously clever that at 12 his teachers sent
him home from the yeshiva with instructions not to bother returning as there
was nothing else they could teach him and who at his Bar-mitzvah address spoke
with such passion, prescience and learning that the community immediately
pronounced him an 'Iluy', a prodigy of learning.

A young Paul Levertoff in his missionary days with Robert
Feinsilber, who helped hatch the plan to save the boys, at his side

Feivel
Levertoff was also an outstanding scholar and in her book of memoirs, “Tesserae”,
Denise Levertov recounts an episode when her 8 or 9 year old father picked up a
scrap of paper in the snow “about a boy like himself who – it said – was found
in the Temple expounding the scriptures to the old, reverent, important
rabbis!” Entranced he took the scrap of paper home to show his father, who was
furious, tore the paper to shreds and threw it in the fire. It was, of course, the
story of Jesus and Feivel’s fascination was prophetic because a few years
later, as a student in Germany at a Rabbinical Seminary , he came across a copy
of the Gospels translated into Hebrew. These he read clandestinely and as he
read he became stirred by a ‘profound and shaking new conviction’ that this
man, this renegade Palestinian Jew who had died during the height of the Roman Empire,
really was the Messiah. Paul Levertoff became a JBJ, a Jewish Believer in
Jesus, had himself baptised as Paul Philip and for fifteen years became a
professional missionary visiting Jewish communities in places as far apart as
Hungary, Bosnia, Egypt and Palestine.In
1910 he took a post as Evangelist in Constantinople offered to him by the
United Free Church of Scotland where he met Beatrice Spooner-Jones, a teacher
at the Scottish mission school.Beatrice
was an orphan from Holywell who had been brought up in the guardianship of her
uncle, a Congregationalist minister who consented, when she 19, to her going abroad.
Her first hope had been to go to Paris but her horrified uncle rejected the
suggestion out of hand, the French capital being a totally unsuitable place for
an unattached young woman. He agreed to the more dubious proposition of
Constantinople because it was to teach at a church school. So the naïve young
Welsh woman who spoke no language other than English and had only previously
set foot outside of Wales to visit Liverpool and Chester set off unaccompanied
to travel across Europe and take up residence in the Sublime Porte.

The
couple were married in 1911 and lived in Warsaw until the outbreak of the first
World War when, as a Russian citizen, Paul was placed under house arrest and
was technically a prisoner of war for the duration of hostilities. After the war Beatrice persuaded Paul to leave
battle ravaged Europe and return with her to Wales where family contacts helped
arrange work for him as a Librarian at St. Deiniol’s Library in Flintshire
whilst he prepared for ordination into the Church of England.From Flintshire the Levertoff’s moved to
Ilford, Beatrice already pregnant with Denise and their eldest daughter Olga a
toddler. Paul had been made Director of the East London Fund for the Jews and
vicar of Holy Trinity in Shoreditch. He began to conduct liturgy in Hebrew and
gathered a small but loyal congregation of Jewish converts who were ecstatic to
find a spiritual leader who recognised their Jewishness as much as he accepted
their Christianity.The Levertoff’s
lived at Mansfield Road for the next 31 years and Paul worked on many of his
most influential books in Ilford. He produced a noted translation into English
of sections of the Zohar, a key text of the Kabbalah as well as translating St Augustine’s
‘Confessions’ into Hebrew. Amongst his many books were ‘The Son of Man; A
Survey of the Life and Deeds of Jesus Christ’, ‘St Paul in Jewish Thought’ and
his most renowned work ‘Love and the Messianic Age.’ According to Denise her father was fluent in Russian,
German, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, English, Yiddish and Arabic.

Levertoff and the boys - his wife Beatrice is standing in front of him and Denise is being carried.

The
boys saved from the Nazis were 10 teenage ‘mischling’ boys, who even though
raised as Chritians had one Jewish and were therefore ‘crossbreeds’ according to
the third Reich. In July 1938 after the Anschluss when Germany had annexed
Austria Levertoff announced to his
Stepney congregation his plan to establish a hostel where ten “Jewish Christian
refugees of student age and type will be givenhospitality, taught English, shorthand and typing and assisted to
complete their studies…” Levertoff had a
friend and colleague in Vienna, Robert Feinsilber, who urged him to help ethnic
Jews raised as Christians. The pair recruited a pastor from the Swedish mission
in Vienna to help them find suitable candidates and soon identified their ten
mischlings. Levertoff had difficulties obtaining visas for the ten boys, his
application to the Home Office apparently going nowhere. His eldest daughter
Olga, then 8 ½ months pregnant came to the rescue, marching intothe Home Office and demanding an explanation
then fainting away in front of the horrified civil servants eyes. Terrified
that she was about to go into labour they quickly came up with the required ten
visas and then hustled Olga out into the street.The ten new arrivals were initially billeted
at Mansfield Road but then moved into the church hall at Holy Trinity. When
Levertoff died in “the boys” paid for the headstone and also for the
maintenance of his grave when Beatrice Levertoff decided to leave England and
follow Denise to the United States.